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Sixty Indonesian crew members who claim to be under 18 are being treated as adults in jails and immigration detention centres across Australia after wrist X-ray examinations that police say prove they are not children.

Defence lawyers say the X-rays are unreliable.

The Age reported this week that 14 months after the three boys were detained no Australian officials had contacted anybody in their home village of Manamolo, on Roti Island, to establish their ages or informed their families that they were in jail.

One of the boy's fathers presumed he had drowned.

A Department of Immigration interviewer reported last October that on balance all three boys were believed to be under 18, but their lawyers had not been told about the assessment for more than six months.